The Headmaster's Dilemma (11 page)

"Thank you, Elihu. That will be all."

Michael hoped he had finally disposed of the matter when he relieved Caldwell of his prefectship, assigned him to another dormitory, and gave him thirty hours of weekend tasks, clearing snow off faculty driveways and washing their cars. To Elihu nothing was done.

But he was surprised, when he described the case to Ione one night, that she did not wholly approve of his action.

"Did you ask the Castor boy if he had told Caldwell of his mother's cancer scare?"

"No. It was an obvious bid for sympathy."

"But did the boy actually use it?"

"I assumed so."

"That might have been the key. You should learn to be more suspicious, my dear. It would stand you in good stead if you ever found yourself in the position of a foundation head having to give away large sums of money."

"Now what in the world made you think of that?"

"Something I've been waiting all day to tell you. I've a letter from the chairman of the Gladwin Foundation asking me if you were interested enough in their directorship to come down to New York for a preliminary interview."

He gave her a long hard stare. "Ione, what have you been up to?"

"I simply told him at the wedding anniversary party that you were well qualified for the job. He was the one who brought the matter up. I didn't commit you in any way. I didn't even say you were interested."

"I'm not. But obviously you are. That's what troubles me. Oh, my poor darling, are you so wretched at Averhill?"

"No, no! I'm only thinking of you and your future. Really, I am! Won't you go down, even for just an interview?"

"I could not think of leaving the school at this juncture. Even for you, my dearest!"

"Oh, I'd hate it if you did it only for me!" And to his dismay, she burst into tears. "Oh, we'll stay in Averhill forever, of course. For ever and ever! And I'm going to be good about it, too. I mean that!"

Michael did the only thing he could do: he made love to her. But he was beginning to wonder if he might be becoming a bit of a Bossy Caldwell. As Bossy Caldwell seemed already to suspect.

M
ICHAEL AFTERWARD
always told himself that it might have worked. The thing that wrecked it was something he could never have guessed and something to which the answer was never found. How did Bossy find out that Elihu had accused him of rape? Had he simply divined it from the fact that no disciplinary action was taken? Was he subtle enough to have gleaned the fact that no headmaster could afford the publicity that such an accusation would arouse? He was certainly very subtle.

It later appeared that Caldwell had snarled at Elihu, "I'm going to get you for what you did, you little fairy sneak. You won't know when or how until it happens, but you'll know every minute of the day and night it's surely coming! Oh, yes, we'll get you!"

"We," poor Elihu wondered. Who were "we"? Perhaps the whole mighty sixth form, uniting to avenge one of their own? Would they "pump" him, as the terrible term was, for a revenge carried out while a sympathetic faculty turned its back? Mightn't they even drown him by mistake?

Elihu lived now in such panic that he could hardly concentrate on his studies. In his dormitory the boys didn't know just what had happened on the night when Mr. Smithers had found Bossy Caldwell in his cubicle and sent him sharply back to his own, but the speculation was rife and lewd. What they did surmise from Bossy's sly wink and shoulder shrug and malevolent glance at Elihu was that the latter had been guilty of some dishonorable "snitch" for which nemesis was waiting. In a matter of only a week Elihu was assigned to the infirmary with some kind of undiagnosed nervous disorder, and the next his dormmates knew was that he had been sent home for an indefinite period to effect a cure.

Elihu's panic dissolved behind the thick walls of the protecting Beaux Arts mansion on Seventieth Street, but he knew that his salvation depended on his never returning to Averhill, at least while Bossy was there. There was obviously only one way to assure himself of this, and at last he gathered the courage to tell his story to his anxious mother, who had had him under constant interrogation as to just what had occurred at school to upset him so. In his version of the episode, of course, Bossy appeared as a lustful ape and himself as the chaste and violated victim.

The result was even more than he had hoped. His mother's eyes widened as he had never seen them do, and her scream tore his eardrums.

"Oh, my poor darling ravished child! What can I do to make up for this dreadful thing? Tell me, tell me, my sweety boy, what Mama can do to console you and make you happy again and safe again and her own lovey-dovey innocent babe?" With which she almost smothered him in a maternal hug.

"Don't send me back there, please Mummy. Don't send me back."

"Send you back! To that den of iniquity! I should think not. I'll send something back to that cesspool—you can be sure of that—but it won't be my darling boy."

Asking him now what he would like to do, of all the wonderful things she could offer him to take his mind off the horror, she was a trifle surprised at the speed with which he announced his desire to go to a popular musical comedy, but he was sent off to it at a matinée that same day while she went at once to her lawyer's office.

That night, when her husband came home from his afternoon bridge game at his club, she told the butler to ask him to meet her in the library. When Elias came in she told him solemnly to close the door behind him.

"What's up?" he asked, as he complied. "Has your new maid mixed up your winter underwear with your summer things? Oh, but that was last week, wasn't it?"

"You like to be funny, Elias, about everything, but today I won't have it. Our son has been subject to a horrible experience at school. Another boy, a school prefect, invaded his cubicle at night."

"Oh, that sort of thing still goes on, does it? It did in my day, but I rather thought they'd cleaned it up."

Rosina had been sitting but now she rose and loomed before him. "Elias Castor, our child has been raped! Do you understand what I am saying?"

He knew at once he had to look serious. He was well aware when Rosina was dangerous, and when she was dangerous she could be very much so. He came forward now and took a seat, indicating that she should also do so. "Forgive my silly tongue, Rosina, and tell me all about it."

It was obviously not going to be one of those moments, like too many others in the minor crises of his largely untroubled life, when he could count on laughs to get him through. These had been his sole refuge in the existence that had preceded his married life, when he had lived with his family, scions of "old New York," as serious as they were high-minded, but of more lineage than cash, with a brilliant lawyer father who had died young before his fortune was realized, a heroic mother who had somehow made ends meet, and two older brothers who had been Phi Beta Kappas and athletic stars at Yale. Elias, far the youngest and certainly the least talented, blond, short, easygoing, cynical, sensual, and always joking, had from childhood refused to compete with the lofty family standards in morals and games and studies, turning a good-natured back on the disapproval of his siblings and ultimately changing the ill will of his surrounding society into a grudging respect for his bubbling wit and unrebuffable good nature. His favorite motto was Oscar Wilde's famous advice on how to deal with temptation, and he dared cheerfully to proclaim to all that it was his inexorable fate—thank you very much—to marry for money. Which at age thirty he did. And no one who met Rosina was under any illusion that he could have had any other motive.

There had, however, been one serious period in his unserious life, and it unfolded now before him as his wife inveighed against the horror of Averhill. At age sixteen he had been briefly happy at that school. His ebullient nature and cheerful humor had gained him a mild but definite popularity even with the more athletic leaders of the form, and he had found a resource in poetry that had actually turned his mind away from himself. And he had formed a close friendship with Tommy Bendle, who later became a recognized poet. The two of them had taken long weekend hikes in the beautiful autumnal countryside, reciting quatrains from the
Rubáiyat
. Elias had even composed a dramatic monologue in what he hoped was the style of Browning about the apostacy of the Roman emperor Julian. It had been a heady time, and he had known a new happiness, but at Yale, where both boys matriculated, Elias was lured too often to New York for debutante parties, and Bendle, increasingly immersed in his verse making, had become something of a recluse. The friendship drooped and finally ended when Elias chose another roommate more in the social swing of college life.

It was the nostalgic memory of those halcyon Averhill days, shedding a roseate glow over the past, that now jarred disagreeably with Rosina's hysterical denunciations.

"Please, please, Rosina," he pleaded, "can't you take this a little more calmly? Let us go over it step by step. Surely you are not implying that the school does not thoroughly disapprove of what Elihu says happened to him?"

"What Elihu
says!
" Rosina almost shrieked. "Do you think our son would lie?"

"Any boy might lie."

"But not about a thing like this! You don't seem to realize that the child was violated."

Patiently he listened to her repetition of the episode. A very similar thing had happened to him at Averhill, and he recalled it with unblushing pleasure. It had started with his being rather pushed around, but that was not the way it had ended. Had something of the same sort happened to Elihu? Possibly. But even if not, what harm was done? Boys did that sort of thing. Elihu might well be in emotional trouble, but that was not from Averhill. His mother had been the cause of that.

"Very well," he said at last. "I think I get the picture. What I fail to see is what you expect us to do about it. If we raise a stink, do you think that is going to help our boy when he goes back to the school?"

"Elias Castor, what are you talking about? Do you think I'm ever going to return my son to that sink of perversion? Never in your life! You ask what I'm going to do about it. I'm going to give that institution the treatment it deserves. I'm going to prosecute it! I'm going to sue it! I'm going to blacken its name from coast to coast!"

"You want damages?"

"I want justice!"

"You don't care then that this sort of publicity may redound badly on Elihu?"

"Why should it? He's innocent, the poor boy. He's the victim. He will grow up to understand that there are cases where a decent citizen must brave dirt thrown to expose crime!"

"A crime? How has the school broken a law?"

"By failing to report Elihu's complaint. There's a Massachusetts statute that requires the school to inform the local DA of any student's allegation of a sexual assault. This was obviously not done. The whole thing was hushed up."

"You've talked to a lawyer already, Rosina?"

"Damn right I have!"

"I think you might have told me first."

Rosina exploded at this. "Why should I have done that? When have you been the slightest help to me in any of my legal or financial affairs? Have you done anything but be the recipient of my bounty? Well, I'm telling you right now, Elias Castor, that I am expecting some small return for all that I've done for you since our marriage. I don't half like your attitude in this matter. You don't seem to care about what your own son has miserably suffered. I want you to stand behind me in every step I take in this business, and if you fail me there are plenty of ways in which I can fail you. Don't put me to it. I made one mistake in letting you talk me into sending the boy to this filthy school. I don't intend to make another."

She had risen and was standing before him in a threatening pose, her thick rouged lips flapping as she spoke, her dyed red head shaking. He thought of Jezebel and how she had been thrown down from a high window and consumed by dogs. But he felt a sickness in his stomach with the realization of his utter impotence. Unknown to her his gambling debts at one of his clubs had risen to twenty thousand dollars, and he would need all his diminishing credit with her to get them paid.

H
UDDLED AT THE TIP
of a small rocky peninsula, sticking its nose into the rough Atlantic off Cape Cod, was a dark, weather-beaten pile of shingle surrounded by deep porches and surmounted by inexplicable towers, the summer residence of Ezra Prentice, retired senior partner of Prentice & Brooks, one of State Street's most venerable law firms. And seated on the porch with the veteran jurist, contemplating a sea preparing itself for an early spring storm, was his son, Hiram, the small, balding, pale but aspiring district attorney from a mid-state county. Both held in their hands dark glasses of undiluted whiskey.

"There's very little point in your coming to see me, Hiram, if you don't take my advice." Ezra's tone was emphasized by a deep crackle. "You can do as I say, and maybe one day be governor of the state. Who knows? Stranger things have happened. Or you can listen to that mollycoddle of a wife of yours and end up precisely where you started."

"But, Father, I never said I wasn't going to take your advice," the son protested. "I was just asking you to look at the question from some other points of view."

"It's the same damn thing."

"Is it? You think I'm going against you when I point out that scandals about sex have sometimes boomeranged against the politicians who have used them?"

"Against the politicians who have misused them! You've got a clear case, my boy."

"How can I be sure of that?"

"Because it's the kind of flung dung that always sticks. Now you listen to me, Hiram, while I go over a few fundamentals of who we are, men like you and me, and how we got to where we've got. I know it's an old story, but something tells me that your memory needs jogging. It's probably the fault of that wife of yours. A man who mixes his wife with his business is a man lost."